Invesco V.I. Equity & Income Fund’s assets rose 17 percent to $1.1 billion. The Atlanta-based fund has 65 percent in stocks and about 28 percent in bonds, and owns JPMorgan Chase & Co. and EBay Inc., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

U.S. mutual funds that own equities and bonds have returned about 8.8 percent on average in 2013, compared with the S&P 500’s 16 percent gain and a loss of 1 percent for 10-year Treasuries, according to Bloomberg data on mutual funds with an average allocation of 62 percent to equities and 25 percent to bonds.

Best Return

With the S&P 500 posting its best return for the first four months of the year since 1998, balanced funds have added more than twice the $16.5 billion U.S. equity funds received, data from ICI and Bloomberg show.

Individual investors bought and sold more stock last quarter than in the previous one. Daily trades at brokerages Charles Schwab Corp., TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. and E*Trade Financial Corp. rose about 14 percent in the first three months of the year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“One of the common denominators for funds that are gaining a lot of assets is that they have very flexible mandates,” Michael Fredericks, head of retail multi-asset client solutions for New York-based BlackRock Inc., said by telephone. He manages the BlackRock Multi-Asset Income Fund, which oversees $3.4 billion that started in 2008, and the BlackRock Multi-Asset Real Return Fund, which started in 2012.

‘Building Portfolios’

“You had huge drawdowns in 2008 and 2009,” Fredericks said. “A lot of investors reflected on that experience and thought, ‘I might not have the stomach for buy and hold. Isn’t there a better approach to building portfolios that doesn’t subject me to so much risk and volatility?’”

The last two times hybrid deposits peaked, the S&P 500 kept gaining. In February 1994, about $18.6 billion was added to the funds over four months, and the S&P 500 more than tripled for the next six years, data compiled by Bloomberg show. When deposits reached another high of $22.3 billion by April 2004, the equity gauge advanced more than 40 percent through October 2007.

U.S. equity-only funds saw an increase the year after hybrids flows hit a record in 1994. They received $112.9 billion in 1995, up 61 percent from the year earlier, surpassing $100 billion for the first time ever, ICI data show.